Vikram Chandra at Cody's Books January 9, 2007

VIKRAM CHANDRA’s third and most ambitious work, SACRED GAMES, arrives as a great, grand gift for winter reading. We invite you to toast both book and author this evening, as we celebrate a remarkable blend of high and popular art that crosses the genres of detective fiction and the crime world of The Godfather with the capaciousness of Victorian serial novels, reinventing them in the most powerful literary terms. In the mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic fictional mosaic he creates, Chandra brings to life the complex textures of daily life in modern India, pulsing with human ambition and desire, where wealth lives cheek by jowl with poverty, and a burgeoning underworld feeds off the growing, universal desire for possessions, influence, and domination. SACRED GAMES is a “hugely ambitious and dazzlingly energetic book” (Times, London), a “Rabelaisian masterpiece of mordant homage to Bombay today” (Tehelka, India), and “one of the most masterful works of literature, a great crime thriller, a magnificent city novel, and an exploration of the Indian psyche at the close of the millennium that has never been attempted before on this scale, and has certainly never been accomplished this masterfully” (Hindustan Times, India). Vikram Chandra was educated in India and the US. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was published in 1995; it won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. A collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997; it, too, won a Commonwealth Prize for Best Book, and was included in numerous “Best Books of the Year” lists in England, India, and the US. He currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, where he teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley. 7:00 PM at Cody’s Fourth Street, Berkeley

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